WILLIAM DEAN
Bibliography
Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1.
Henry Nelson Wieman, Religious Experience and Scientific Method.
Cross-Reference: Existential Theology, Metaphysics, Panentheism, Philosophical Theology, Process Theology.
BELIEF (See DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, FAITH.)
BIBLICAL CRITICISM
Biblical criticism uses a wide range of methods; all of them involve reading the biblical text “from a distance.” It can be put this way: “Reading” the Bible means entering into the text directly, letting it open its own world to the reader, while “criticism” means looking at the text in order to understand it according to standards that come (at least in part) from a different world and not directly from the text itself. There is no pure “reading” without some form of critical distance (even if unreflective) to enrich it, and all forms of criticism also imply some direct appreciation of the text.
The Historical Critical Method. Most modern biblical criticism has been strongly historical, so much so that the “historical critical method” has often been called the only critical way to read the Bible. Historical study usually moves “behind” the text, to reconstruct the events, people, and religious and social practices from which the written books emerged. The historical critical method emphasizes the movement of history in time but not necessarily as an evolutionary movement from the simple or primitive to the more developed. Also basic to the historical method is comparison between the biblical tradition and the cultures of the environment.
Often historical study of the Bible has been rigidly convinced that the criteria for interpretation should be taken wholly from modern experience, so that anything foreign to the historian’s experience would be explained by modern criteria of reasonableness. Thus, how to interpret miracles was a classic question raised by historical study of the Bible, since most modern people do not experience miracles directly. But historical study can also allow the different world of the past to open new possibilities for the present that would not have seemed reasonable apart from the biblical text.
Historically oriented study of the Bible also raises the question of the canon; that is, what makes the biblical books distinctive, for historical study often points out the similarities between what is found in the Bible and other customs and faith. Modern discoveries of Jewish and early Christian books closely related to parts of the Bible have made the canon an urgent question for modern study of the Bible. What if such a work as the Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Egypt in the twentieth century) were to give a picture of Jesus somehow on a par with that of the Gospels?
Historical study of the Bible runs the danger of being interested only in the distant past. Hence other forms of criticism supplement or replace it. Most of them look at the formal patterns of the biblical literature (see below).
Canonical Criticism. Canonical criticism bridges the gap between critical historical study and the tradition of faith. Historical criticism has often looked “behind” the text to reconstruct a history or an earlier form of the biblical literature, but canonical criticism focuses on the biblical books themselves, usually in their completed present form, since these are the books the church has revered. It affirms that the meaning of the Bible is found in the believing community, yet that this meaning has not been constant, but was always discovered in concrete situations at particular times. Thus the history of the community and its interaction with the biblical texts gives access to the meaning of the Bible today. For example, the repeated effort in the Bible to discover and express a single loyalty to the one God (i.e., the many and varied rejections of idolatry) can be taken, in canonical criticism, to disclose a theme that will be central for interpreting the Bible now.
Sociological Criticism. Sociological criticism is a type of historical study that inquires about the social conditions in which a biblical work originally functioned. It shifts attention away from the individual believer to the group, and reminds the reader that what was originally written for a very different social situation is misunderstood if it is simply applied to a modern individual reader.
Textual Criticism. Printing made a standard text possible. The collection, ordering, and evaluation of the myriad variations in the several thousand manuscript copies of the Bible (or parts of it) is the task of textual criticism. The careful, word-for-word comparison of biblical manuscripts with some standard text and the recording of all the variations is a task that is far from complete today. Recent discoveries of texts—both of the Hebrew Bible (especially those among the Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran discoveries) and of the New Testament (especially among the papyri found in Egypt)—have added far older witnesses to the biblical text than were available until the twentieth century.
The task of sifting these variations in the text and deciding on the best text is the second phase of textual criticism. It involves the weighing of the age of the variation in question, and also the weighing of the probabilities of how this “reading” fits the thought of the book as otherwise known and how effectively it explains other variations of the same verse or section. For example, in Matthew 5:22, “Every one who is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment,” the phrase “without cause” has been rejected from modern texts and translations on both counts: It is not found in many early copies of Matthew, and it is not consistent with the sharp challenge that the Sermon on the Mount offers elsewhere.
Philology and Linguistics. The Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages of the Bible have been studied with the goal of determining, as accurately as possible, the particular meanings of words and sentence structures. The splendid grammars and dictionaries of biblical languages now available are the fruit of this philological study. Philology sees language “diachronically,” as it develops in time; it has also shown how the languages of the Bible are related to those of neighboring cultures.
Modern linguistics focuses sharply on the structures of language as a “synchronic” system, as it functions as a self-regulating system at a particular time, without regard to its historical development. Negatively, linguistics makes relative the dictionary approach to language by showing that words do not have constant, self-contained meanings, but that they always function in relationships, in a context within which meaning is created.
Linguistics distinguishes between “language,” the whole system that makes possible the production of any particular sentence, and “speech,” the concrete acts of speaking or writing, and it shows how specific acts or statements in language are made possible by the more general structures. In biblical studies linguistics has been especially fruitful in the work of translation. Since words and sentence structures do not correspond exactly from language to language, careful attention to functional equivalents is important.
Form Criticism. Many passages in the Bible functioned in the life of the community before they were included in the books where we now find them. Psalms, hymns, and parables are clear examples, but others, such as laws, required historical study before the existence of the form prior to the written text could be recognized. Form criticism is the study of formal patterns that functioned in particular sociological ways. First used in the study of the Hebrew Bible, it was able to offer new classifications of the psalms (praise,